The long term solutions will probably remove helmets altogether thus removing the head hits and moving the sport along rugby lines with high hits eliminated entirely.
You could see more and more rugby style tackling as well. I know die heard football fans will be up in arms about that believe it would remove the core uniqueness of the sport, but remember the sport started as an offshoot to rugby with no helmets or padding. They were only introduced because of the flying wedge and Theodore Roosevelt threatened to ban the sport after 19 players were killed during one football season. He said make it safer or I'll outlaw it. So padding and helmets were introduced.
But the flying wedge was outlawed as well and all that helmets especially have led to is an deluded belief that heads are protected and therefore can be used as weapons.
The game will have to be changed as the research is only going one way, painting a worse and worse picture the more studies are done.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...fl-moment-as-concussions-bring-legal-scrutiny
Concussion Concerns: Is This Rugby Union’s NFL Moment?
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Millions of television viewers knew Wales winger George North had lost consciousness when he flopped to the ground after banging his head trying to stop England from scoring in their opening match of rugby’s 6 Nations tournament.
His team doctors, however, didn’t see his head strike a teammate’s or the awkward face-first collapse, his second in the 21-16 loss Feb. 6 in Cardiff. The 1.93-meter, 109-kilogram (6- foot-4, 240-pound) athlete got up and played on, only to miss the next several weeks recovering. The incident comes as rugby and other contact sports like the National Football League are focused on protecting players — bigger, faster and fitter than ever — while delivering entertainment in a crowded market.
“It’s pretty poor,” Joel Leigh, a partner at London law firm Howard Kennedy, said in an interview. “There’s always that worry that you’ve got the commercial driver of wanting the players to stay on the pitch, of wanting the game to carry on uninterrupted, and of course the players themselves who just want to play.”North’s head trauma led to a probe by the sport’s governing body. He should have come out of the match, World Rugby said, but it accepted that Wales’ medical team hadn’t seen the second incident. The ruling body is planning video replays for medics at the World Cup in September — the sport’s $900 million event in England and Wales that’s predicted to break attendance and television viewer records.
In the final round of the 6 Nations on March 21, England faces France, while Scotland plays Ireland and Italy meets Wales.
Health Concerns
Rugby is researching the long-term effects of injuries to players’ heads and necks, which can encounter forces stronger than an F-16 fighter pilot performing a roll. It’s partially protective, as the NFL, National Hockey League and other sports bodies face lawsuits from former athletes looking for compensation for disabilities.
“We don’t want to be visiting our players in 25 years to find them suffering from dementia or other neurological diseases,” Saracens Rugby Club Chief Executive Officer Edward Griffiths said.
The north London club has started a three-year project to document the physical strains players endure in practice and games.
On a rainy morning last month at Saracens’ Allianz stadium, a sports scientist was sticking a small patch behind the ears of player Hayden Smith before training. Made by Seattle-based X2 Biosystems, it contains a sensor measuring the size and direction of blows.
Sports Science
The patches are collected after each session, and the data downloaded. Concussion has become such an emotive topic, Saracens won’t say who’s conducting the research until its conclusion.
Griffiths said he hopes the study, for which he’s raised 350,000 pounds ($520,000), will give a definitive answer to when should a player be taken off with injury, and when can he resume playing? “There are protocols, but they’re all too loose and they’re all too open to judgment,” Griffiths said. “What we’re seeking is a clear, scientific measure which says, that player needs to come off the field in this time.”
Concussion was the most common injury at Premiership clubs for a third year, accounting for 12.5 percent of incidents, according to the English rugby’s governing body. English clubs reported 86 during matches and eight in training in 2013-14, a 59 percent increase from the previous year.
Bigger, Faster
Since rugby union turned professional in 1995, improved conditioning and diets as well as tackling higher up on the body instead of on the legs mean the game is more physical with more high-speed collisions.
The NFL reached a $765 million settlement with former players over concussions that was blocked in February by a federal judge, who said it should expand payment for some claims made by the more than 5,000 players who sued the NFL seeking damages for head injuries. Retirees accused the league of hiding links between repeated traumatic head impact and brain injuries such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s and chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
The NFL, whose teams use X2 technology to evaluate concussions, said it was “confident” the settlement would be approved and provide “generous benefits.”
Brain Disease
CTE, a brain disease that can cause mood swings, depression, loss of memory and irritability, can only be diagnosed after death. It was found in the autopsies of several former NFL players who committed suicide, including 12-time Pro Bowl linebacker Junior Seau in 2012.
In October, English rugby announced changes to head trauma management. Players, coaches and officials have to pass an online class, while researchers will monitor athletes returning from head injuries. Doctors will have 10 minutes instead of five to check for head trauma during matches. “It is a misconception that the protocols that exist in the elite game are not working, as the research states the opposite,” World Rugby spokesman Dominic Rumbles said. “They are enhancing the protection of players.”
Before the 2012 introduction of the temporary substitution for a head injury assessment, Rumbles said, 56 percent of players who were treated and cleared to play were later found to have concussion. Since then, that figure is down to 12 percent.
‘Lip Service’
Still, the North incident showed the sport is paying “lip service” to concussion-related issues, according to Leigh, whose firm has represented Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton and some Premier League clubs.
Rugby may be at risk of lawsuits similar to the NFL “unless sporting bodies get their heads down and actually implement properly the various mechanisms and protective measures which they have committed to undertaking,” he said.
In May, a coroner’s inquest in Dublin found that amateur Kenny Nuzum died from repeated head blows while playing for Landsdowne. Nuzum, whose family donated his brain for research, died at 57 from CTE.
Last January, New Zealand’s Shontayne Hape retired at 33 after at least 20 concussions and blackouts in his career.
Writing in the New Zealand Herald in May, Hape said coaches used “constant pressure” to keep athletes on the field, and that players would underperform on a preseason test so they’d pass it during the season if they were injured.
Doug King, a sports injury epidemiologist at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, measured the frequency and magnitude of head impacts suffered by 38 rugby players using mouthguards fitted with accelerometers made by X2. The work was published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine in December.
It found that rugby players sustained an average 77 hits to the head per game, while American college football players only recorded 9 to 13 in earlier studies. While the gravitational weight, or G-force, of the direct impacts to the head roughly matched that seen in college football, the rotational acceleration when the head snaps back or sideways from body collisions was significantly higher among rugby players, he found.
Risks
“There are a lot of people who say rugby is a totally different game from American football, but my findings show that the risks may actually be higher in rugby,” King said.
The risks are all part of the game for Saracens’ Smith, a 2.01-meter, 107-kilogram Australian-born American who played for the U.S. at the 2011 World Cup.
Playing as a lock “obviously involves being incredibly physical and somewhat violent,” said Smith, who also played for the NFL’s New York Jets in 2012-13. “But you’ve become probably a little desensitized to that.”
George North has a similar outlook.
“At the end of the day, it is rugby, isn’t it?,” he told reporters on Feb. 26 before his comeback against France. “It’s not table tennis, or tiddlywinks. It is a contact sport and you are going to get some bangs.”
